Filling in the Matrix

Heather and I have been researching agencies and asking them to fill in our questionnaire so that we can have answers to all of the questions that we decided to answer on our website. We decided to take out some of the questions that we no longer thought were really necessary, and we moved some of the agency specific information into our general description category for a different page on the website.

Heather and I have not heard back from the agencies we emailed our questionnaires to, so we will be calling them this week in hopes of being able to speak with someone who can answer all of our questions. We have decided to include the responses we do receive, and to leave certain areas of our website blank if we were unable to find out the information by our deadline.

*Observation/Learning Point: It is difficult to work with a deadline when you are depending on other people's responses to you. I also feel like communicating with the agencies has been like selling...you have to show them a benefit to helping you with your project. This is a project that could continue on for years as a senior project, with different teams picking it up and growing and changing it along the way. There is so much information out there, and plenty could still be added to our website in the future.

We've brainstormed an idea for the layout of the website yesterday, and will be meeting tomorrow to start creating our website.

Evaluating Agencies

Today Heather and I met to create a list of questions to send agencies according to the percentage criteria we placed on the responses from our questionnaire and interviews. We plan on making a chart that will show what each US agency with Thai adoption programs offers with the answers to these questions. We plan on this being our main page on the website, but not being the home page.

We revised our GANTT chart today because we realized we have more research to do and that this has to happen before we can create a layout for the website and begin to work on that.

So, we are off to research more!...We have divided the agencies (Koura has A-F and Heather has G-Z) up. We will each research our agencies to find information to answer the questions we made today for the agencies before we send the agencies our list of questions. We hope to receive responses from our assigned agencies within 1-1.5 weeks.

Analyzing the Data

Heather and I have met about 2-3 times a week over the past few weeks. We have gathered results by interviewing people who are/were interested in adoption and who have already adopted. We also had our friends and families respond to a few key questions we emiled out in order to help us determine what content will be most useful to have on the website we are creating.

After receiving responses from 26 individuals, we analyzed the responses by reading through them individually, creating categories under which we could place them, and adding check marks to those categories that were represented in additional responses.

After sorting through all of the responses, we decided to analyze the data by determing a reasonable percentage for the number of responses that would have to be present in order for the individual category to be placed on our website. As we had 26 total respondents, we decided that a reasonable "Put on website" percentage for the Agency Specific section of our website would be 20% (more than 5 responses in an individual category) and that 15% (at least 4 responses in an individual category) would be a reasonable percentage for the General Descriptive section of our website since this is not what our questions or interviews were geared toward.

Updating Database with Friends' Responses

Over the past couple of days, I have added all of the responses I've received to one of our databases.

I have also emailed and researched another agency- The Family Network, Inc. (http://www.adopt-familynetwork.com/). Thailand is not an international program mentioned on the company's website, but the Thailand Adoption site says they've recently done some Thai placements, so I emailed the agency to find out more...I have not heard back yet.

Updating Databases, Sending Out Questionnaires, AI's For Next Time

Heather and I met for about 2 hours today. I updated our database with 2 new sets of responses we've received from people who are interested in adopting or who have already adopted. We have 5 of these responses total now, which Heather and I do not believe is enough.

I modified and shortened our list of questions, and we each sent this new questionnaire to several people on our emailing lists. We believe this information can still be useful, and we hypothesize that people who are not considering adoption will come up with similar responses to what we have already captured in our database. I've created a new database to keep track of all of the responses Heather and I receive from the emails we each sent out today. This afternoon, I've already received 1 set of responses and have updated the database with it.

Until we meet again next Thursday, I will continue to update the new database with new responses. I will also continue to research adoption agencies and to capture some of what I discover in a spreadsheet.

Contacting Agencies

I am researching and emailing agencies that appear to facilitate adoption from Thailand. I have requested information packets (noted as "a" below) and/or asked for contact information for adoptive parents who may be willing to answer the list of questions Heather and I put together (noted as "b" below). Here is who I emailed and today:

1. All About Adoptions- a (emailed domestic adoption office for international packet so I wouldn't be emailing Maimi office twice),b (emailed Miami office)
2. A.S.I.A. (Adoption Service Information Agency)- a,b. emailed main office in Maryland
3. Crossroads Adoption Services- a,b (they don't have anyone to refer to us)
4.Adoption Advocates International- a (received)

I am also maintaining a database to keep updated and remain organized about our current communication status with each of the agencies we've researched.

Updating the Database

Tonight I added another set of responses to our database/spreadsheet and sent the updated document to Heather. I also created a spreadsheet of questions for people to fill out so that we can simply copy and paste their responses into the Excel database we have.

I emailed All About Adoptions, Inc. (foreign@allaboutadoptions.org), asking for referrals of families who had adopted internationally through the agency. Hopefully, we can send these referrals our questionnaire in order to increase the quantity and diversity of the feedback we are getting.